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Strength of Competition Index

I have a complicated relationship with my killboards. On one hand I don't pay much attention to them and I believe that giving them any attention at all is a recipe for all sorts of things I like to avoid. On the other hand I do like maintaining a 75% or better kill ratio. (Which I do thank you very much.) As a PvPer I think that is an honest goal worthy of striving for. I don't play enough to worry about numbers, I'll never be the top killer or one of the best PvPers in Eve numbers wise. That's not why I play the game anyway. But I can't deny a certain pride in having a solid killboard. I do take my own PvP seriously, I just don't care much for numbers and comparisons. But the killboards are there.

Ok, now that the preamble is out of the way, I have a suggestion.

Personally I believe that basing rankings on numbers of kills and numbers of losses is grossly misleading. Sheer volume of kills is one thing and I don't want this post to come across like I'm saying it doesn't mean something, because it certainly does. But how important is it really? Is it as important as quality of kills?

I came across this idea back when I went through my kills to see how "blobby" I'd been in response to a comment someone made to me in local. During the compilation of those statistics I noticed something about the people I've killed, a majority of them are still in the game and doing very well for themselves. The quality of my opponents has been very high. Contrast that to someone who sits on a low-sec gate in a smart bomb fitted Dominix popping pilots all day. Sure their numbers may be very high volume wise, but surely the quality stinks. The same argument could be made of many different situations. So how to judge quality?

I'm suggesting the creation of a new Killboard statistic. A Strength of Competition Index (SOCI) that calculates the average winning percentage of your foes, those that you've killed, in your PvP career. Not only could there be a gross total, but you could also easily calculate an average. For example, my last 20 kills have a SOCI of 76.91%, which means the pilots I've killed kill 3/4 of the people they face. Or a little better than me actually. For comparison I randomly picked one of the top five pilots on BattleClinic and did the same calculation of their last 20 kills, which have a SOCI of 60.45%.

Does that make me a better PvPer than that person? A pilot who has more than 12,000 kills than me? Of course not. But it does say that the quality of the pilots they are killing isn't the same, in fact it is nearly 20% worse. I think it is a valid additional statistic that is easy enough to calculate with the BC database. It would also be easy enough to generate the opposite statistic, the quality of the pilots killing you. Which also would speak volumes about the quality of pilots you fly against and lose to.

IN ADDITION: This thought just occurred to me. Eve is an amazing game that does a tremendous amount of work towards making the amount of time you play inconsequential to the result. In other words, people that play a lot don't have much of an advantage over those that don't. As long as you're skilling along, time is pretty much equal for all players. PvP Killboards on the other hand, as they are set up now reward those that play more. The SOCI suggestion is one way to even that playing field as well.

Again, this is just a thought I had. I'd be curious as to your thoughts about it.

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